333. True Tales

The book I was reading seemed to be a kind of travelogue. It was part of a series that recounted the experiences of the author as he explored the many places he visited. At one point in the book, the author began to describe an anonymous text he discovered at a small bookstore in the outskirts of a city.

The text he found recounted an incident that took place during a trip to another city, which is what had caught his attention. Not only were the events leading up to the incident and the players involved described in great detail, there were also personal reactions — the thoughts and feelings of the unknown writer as the story unfolded. He described the style of the text as something like a journal entry, or perhaps a story being told to a friend in a letter.

But as he read further, the anonymous text seemed to come apart. There were suddenly descriptions of events and ideas that didn’t fit with the original context. Far from a recounting of personal experience, the text had become abstract and historical. At the same time, the use of the first-person seemed to grant it a kind of authority, he said, as though it were describing events that had really happened but could not be placed.

I was not prepared for what came next. After the author of the travelogue finished describing the anonymous text he claimed to have found, he stated flatly that it was actually a fiction he himself had crafted! It had all been an elaborate tale to share an idea about time and truth that he felt he could not otherwise express.

As I continued to read the book, I became more and more unsure of what was real and what was invented. If the inner text was fictional as the author admitted, then surely his own reported reactions to it were also fictional. But my reactions to his reactions had been entirely real. I thought I was being told something that had actually happened when in fact it was a fabrication. Because I wasn’t told I was reading a work of fiction, I assumed it was an accurate record of the experiences of the author.

But then I wondered if this meant anything in the end. The truth of what had been shown had not changed. It was true in the way all fiction is true. It was only my own assumptions about the words I had read that had been undermined.